This week, we've been putting both the iPad 4 and the Microsoft Surface tablet through their paces. In our testing, we're happy to say that both tablets are very solid HTML5 platforms. Internet Explorer 10 on the Surface has a broad, well implemented HTML5 feature set that mostly meets and occasionally exceeds mobile Safari's. On the performance front, the iPad 4 leads in raw JavaScript and Canvas performance while the Surface has a faster SVG implementation. Having comprehensive, high performance HTML5 support is now a "must-have" feature for new mobile devices. For end users, both these devices promise great user experiences from well-designed HTML5 apps.

Going into our testing, we were bringing expectations set by the iPad 3 and our developer hardware for Windows 8. When we reviewed the iPad 3 in the Spring, we were disappointed with iPad performance. Ordinary web pages as well as HTML5 apps had stutter and visible tiling. Raw JavaScript performance was actually lower on the iPad 3 than the iPad 2. In our opinion, it was an underpowered device, so we were not entirely surprised to see the iPad 4 arrive with vastly improved hardware specs so quickly. On the Microsoft front, when we took our first look at the IE10 preview last Fall, we were very impressed with its HTML5 feature list, but wondered if performance would hold up on tablet-grade hardware. Read on to see what we found.

The Microsoft Surface Since there are already plenty of reviews of the Surface tablet for the regular user, we won't spend much time on its general features except to say that

The integrated (and very sturdy) kickstand should become a standard tablet feature,

The mixed keyboard/touch interface that Windows 8 pioneers is a winner

Bezel gestures to activate control and navigation become natural quickly and are vastly superior than repeatedly jamming the iPad home button

IE's browser tab management is far superior to mobile Safari.

We'll also note that if you plan to evaluate the Surface yourself, it's *essential* to upgrade the pre-installed Office Preview to the release version. Before upgrading, entering text was absurdly and unpredictably laggy not just in Office, but also in browser-based input fields.

The Surface supports multi-touch, with up to 5 separately tracked simultaneous touches. Its JavaScript timer resolution is the Windows standard 16ms (or 64 times per second) when on battery power. When plugged in, the timer jumps to what appears to be a 4ms resolution (the same as iOS and Chrome for Android), but the timer became so noisy at this resolution that it was hard to judge. As we've noted before, JavaScript animations that use a setTimeout of zero to pace their progress will now run faster or slower depending on whether the Surface is plugged in or not. Using explicit time or requestAnimationFrame for JavaScript animation is once again highly recommended.

IE10 has a new collection of CSS properties and events to control touch event handling. Many HTML5 apps will want to use the ms-touch-action: none, to suppress OS pre-emption of touch events within their app. WebKit style touchstart, touchend etc. are not available. Instead we have Microsoft's new pointerEvents, which unifies mouse and touch events under one roof. The Surface has a rock-solid implementation of position: fixed, and even makes a college try of supporting background-attachment: fixed - which Mobile Safari still ignores.

HTML5 feature coverage We tested HTML5 feature presence using Modernizr. IE10 on the Surface has a long list of HTML5 features. This includes indexedDB, CSS animations, 2D and 3D transforms, gradients, transitions, workers, websockets, video and audio playback, and file API. Leapfrogging the iPad 4, IE10 even has a *-implementation of CSS Regions and Exclusions - which we think is a first for a shipping mobile HTML5 browser. Grid layout - which looks to be a permanent IE-only feature is also supported.

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There are some notable omissions and deficiencies compared to the iPad 4. There is no support for the input tag for camera or video capture (introduced in iOS 6), the flexbox implementation is the older, superseded version. There is no border-image support (admittedly the border-image support in mobile Safari is not completely correct either.)

Neither platform supports WebGL, but Microsoft has previously said that it won't support it. Nor were the more esoteric HTML5 inputs like color supported. Notifications and server sent events were likewise absent from both platforms.

JavaScript Performance We ran both the iPad 4 and the Surface through Sunspider and Google's V8 benchmark. Although Sunspider is an imperfect test, it has great historical comparability. The figure below shows the performance of the Surface and iPad 4 indexed to the iPad 2 (1.0). As can be seen, raw JavaScript performance on both platforms is roughly 2x the iPad 2. The iPad 4 has a performance advantage with an average 20% performance edge over than the Surface. On version 7 of the V8 benchmark, the performance difference was more stark. The iPad 4 clocked in at 1565 vs. 775 for the Surface (higher is better), a 2x advantage for the iPad.

SVG Support & Performance Since IE10 has a hardware-accelerated SVG implementation, we decided to dig into performance for SVG. First, we ran David Dailey's decahedra demo which combines rotating and overlapping shapes with SVG gradient animations. The Surface comfortably handled an entire screenful of 50 shapes with solid performance. In comparison, the iPad 4 started to show visible frame transitions at around 15 shapes. A more dynamic pseudo 3D corridor navigation game, reached approximately 18 fps on the Surface vs. 12 fps on the iPad 4.

The SVG implementation in IE10 on the Surface is rich with a full complement of SVG features. It's fantastic, for example, to see broad support for SVG filter effects like color channel manipulation. We did notice a few minor blemishes. The performance of the lighting effects we tried was very poor (10s+) and the feSpotlight primitive was not supported. Lighting effects were noticeably darker than the reference SVG test images. And although Modernizr reported SMIL support, we were unable to get any declarative SVG animation to run successfully. SVG Filter effects are also imperfect on Mobile Safari, and anyone looking to use them should expect vigorous testing and cross-browser normalization.

Canvas Performance Raw canvas benchmarks like this one from mindcat showed the iPad 4 with about a 2x advantage over the Surface. In our benchmark, the iPad 4 scored 1.81 vs. the Surface's 0.904. However, in a variety of real world canvas apps we saw perfectly acceptable performance from the Surface. This included canvas color cycling (once guaranteed to bring a mobile browser to its knees) as well as a variety of Impactjs-based games.

Microsoft's own fishbowl demo was also a good stress test of real world canvas use. This demo composites multiple separate canvas contexts together on top of a background video, with sound effects in a separate audio element. There are also CSS transforms and CSS opacities present. With all effects disabled except basic sprite animation, the Surface managed about 110 concurrent sprite animations at 60fps, while the iPad 4 managed about 135. Strikingly, when we enabled more effects (masks, background, shadows and more.), the iPad 4 held up well while the Surface struggled. With all effects enabled except the background water video, shadow effect and audio, the iPad 4 could support about 100 concurrent sprite animations at 60fps, whereas the Surface was able to support only 10. Canvas compositing appears to be a particularly challenging graphics operation for the Surface vs the iPad.

CSS Performance Early mobile platforms had issues with CSS performance, but we saw good CSS performance with transition and animation effects. Gradients on both platforms were smooth and free of banding.

An Embarrassment of Tablet Riches The Microsoft Surface and the iPad 4 now join the iPad 2 and the RIM Playbook 2 as impressive HTML5 tablet platforms. Both are a big performance improvement over the iPad 2 - the previous best tablet for HTML5 apps. It's also very encouraging to see Microsoft stepping up to the plate and delivering an HTML5 implementation that's relatively comprehensive with solid performance. There's still work remaining of course. It would be nice to see an SVG from both companies with Flash-quality performance in their next generation tablet. And getting camera and video access from a web page is a notable item on the Surface's to-do list. We're looking forward to reviewing the Surface Pro tablets due early next year with higher powered Intel processors.

Michael Mullany is CEO of Sencha. He has held product and executive marketing roles at influential Silicon Valley startups Netscape, Loudcloud and VMware. At virtualization leader VMware, he served as the vice president of worldwide marketing during its break-out into server computing. He holds an MBA from Stanford University and a BA in economics from Harvard College.

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The Workspace-as-a-Service (WaaS) market will grow to $6.4B by 2018. In his session at 16th Cloud Expo, Seth Bostock, CEO of IndependenceIT, will begin by walking the audience through the evolution of Workspace as-a-Service, where it is now vs. where it going.
To look beyond the desktop we must understand exactly what WaaS is, who the users are, and where it is going in the future. IT departments, ISVs and service providers must look to workflow and automation capabilities to adapt to growing demand and the rapidly changing workspace model.

Even as cloud and managed services grow increasingly central to business strategy and performance, challenges remain. The biggest sticking point for companies seeking to capitalize on the cloud is data security. Keeping data safe is an issue in any computing environment, and it has been a focus since the earliest days of the cloud revolution. Understandably so: a lot can go wrong when you allow valuable information to live outside the firewall. Recent revelations about government snooping, along with a steady stream of well-publicized data breaches, only add to the uncertainty

SYS-CON Events announced today that Dyn, the worldwide leader in Internet Performance, will exhibit at SYS-CON's 16th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
Dyn is a cloud-based Internet Performance company. Dyn helps companies monitor, control, and optimize online infrastructure for an exceptional end-user experience. Through a world-class network and unrivaled, objective intelligence into Internet conditions, Dyn ensures traffic gets delivered faster, safer, and more reliably than ever.

Hadoop as a Service (as offered by handful of niche vendors now) is a cloud computing solution that makes medium and large-scale data processing accessible, easy, fast and inexpensive.
In his session at Big Data Expo, Kumar Ramamurthy, Vice President and Chief Technologist, EIM & Big Data, at Virtusa, will discuss how this is achieved by eliminating the operational challenges of running Hadoop, so one can focus on business growth. The fragmented Hadoop distribution world and various PaaS solutions that provide a Hadoop flavor either make choices for customers very flexible in the name of opti...

As organizations shift toward IT-as-a-service models, the need for managing and protecting data residing across physical, virtual, and now cloud environments grows with it. CommVault can ensure protection &E-Discovery of your data – whether in a private cloud, a Service Provider delivered public cloud, or a hybrid cloud environment – across the heterogeneous enterprise.
In his session at 16th Cloud Expo, Randy De Meno, Chief Technologist - Windows Products and Microsoft Partnerships, will discuss how to cut costs, scale easily, and unleash insight with CommVault Simpana software, the only si...

Cloud data governance was previously an avoided function when cloud deployments were relatively small. With the rapid adoption in public cloud – both rogue and sanctioned, it’s not uncommon to find regulated data dumped into public cloud and unprotected. This is why enterprises and cloud providers alike need to embrace a cloud data governance function and map policies, processes and technology controls accordingly.
In her session at 15th Cloud Expo, Evelyn de Souza, Data Privacy and Compliance Strategy Leader at Cisco Systems, will focus on how to set up a cloud data governance program and s...

Roberto Medrano, Executive Vice President at SOA Software, had reached 30,000 page views on his home page - http://RobertoMedrano.SYS-CON.com/ - on the SYS-CON family of online magazines, which includes Cloud Computing Journal, Internet of Things Journal, Big Data Journal, and SOA World Magazine. He is a recognized executive in the information technology fields of SOA, internet security, governance, and compliance. He has extensive experience with both start-ups and large companies, having been involved at the beginning of four IT industries: EDA, Open Systems, Computer Security and now SOA.

The industrial software market has treated data with the mentality of “collect everything now, worry about how to use it later.” We now find ourselves buried in data, with the pervasive connectivity of the (Industrial) Internet of Things only piling on more numbers. There’s too much data and not enough information.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Bob Gates, Global Marketing Director, GE’s Intelligent Platforms business, to discuss how realizing the power of IoT, software developers are now focused on understanding how industrial data can create intelligence for industrial operations. Imagine ...

Operational Hadoop and the Lambda Architecture for Streaming Data
Apache Hadoop is emerging as a distributed platform for handling large and fast incoming streams of data. Predictive maintenance, supply chain optimization, and Internet-of-Things analysis are examples where Hadoop provides the scalable storage, processing, and analytics platform to gain meaningful insights from granular data that is typically only valuable from a large-scale, aggregate view. One architecture useful for capturing and analyzing streaming data is the Lambda Architecture, representing a model of how to analyze rea...

The Internet of Things (IoT) promises to evolve the way the world does business; however, understanding how to apply it to your company can be a mystery. Most people struggle with understanding the potential business uses or tend to get caught up in the technology, resulting in solutions that fail to meet even minimum business goals.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Jesse Shiah, CEO / President / Co-Founder of AgilePoint Inc., showed what is needed to leverage the IoT to transform your business. He discussed opportunities and challenges ahead for the IoT from a market and technical point of vie...

SYS-CON Events announced today that Vitria Technology, Inc. will exhibit at SYS-CON’s @ThingsExpo, which will take place on June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
Vitria will showcase the company’s new IoT Analytics Platform through live demonstrations at booth #330. Vitria’s IoT Analytics Platform, fully integrated and powered by an operational intelligence engine, enables customers to rapidly build and operationalize advanced analytics to deliver timely business outcomes for use cases across the industrial, enterprise, and consumer segments.

Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) are increasing at an unprecedented rate. The threat landscape of today is drastically different than just a few years ago. Attacks are much more organized and sophisticated. They are harder to detect and even harder to anticipate. In the foreseeable future it's going to get a whole lot harder. Everything you know today will change. Keeping up with this changing landscape is already a daunting task. Your organization needs to use the latest tools, methods and expertise to guard against those threats. But will that be enough? In the foreseeable future attacks w...

HP and Aruba Networks on Monday announced a definitive agreement for HP to acquire Aruba, a provider of next-generation network access solutions for the mobile enterprise, for $24.67 per share in cash. The equity value of the transaction is approximately $3.0 billion, and net of cash and debt approximately $2.7 billion. Both companies' boards of directors have approved the deal.
"Enterprises are facing a mobile-first world and are looking for solutions that help them transition legacy investments to the new style of IT," said Meg Whitman, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer of HP...

Containers and microservices have become topics of intense interest throughout the cloud developer and enterprise IT communities.
Accordingly, attendees at the upcoming 16th Cloud Expo at the Javits Center in New York June 9-11 will find fresh new content in a new track called PaaS | Containers & Microservices
Containers are not being considered for the first time by the cloud community, but a current era of re-consideration has pushed them to the top of the cloud agenda. With the launch of Docker's initial release in March of 2013, interest was revved up several notches. Then late last...

The explosion of connected devices / sensors is creating an ever-expanding set of new and valuable data. In parallel the emerging capability of Big Data technologies to store, access, analyze, and react to this data is producing changes in business models under the umbrella of the Internet of Things (IoT). In particular within the Insurance industry, IoT appears positioned to enable deep changes by altering relationships between insurers, distributors, and the insured.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Michael Sick, a Senior Manager and Big Data Architect within Ernst and Young's Financial Servi...

The explosion of connected devices / sensors is creating an ever-expanding set of new and valuable data. In parallel the emerging capability of Big Data technologies to store, access, analyze, and react to this data is producing changes in business models under the umbrella of the Internet of Things (IoT). In particular within the Insurance industry, IoT appears positioned to enable deep changes by altering relationships between insurers, distributors, and the insured.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Michael Sick, a Senior Manager and Big Data Architect within Ernst and Young's Financial Servi...

PubNub on Monday has announced that it is partnering with IBM to bring its sophisticated real-time data streaming and messaging capabilities to Bluemix, IBM’s cloud development platform.
“Today’s app and connected devices require an always-on connection, but building a secure, scalable solution from the ground up is time consuming, resource intensive, and error-prone,” said Todd Greene, CEO of PubNub. “PubNub enables web, mobile and IoT developers building apps on IBM Bluemix to quickly add scalable realtime functionality with minimal effort and cost.”

Sensor-enabled things are becoming more commonplace, precursors to a larger and more complex framework that most consider the ultimate promise of the IoT: things connecting, interacting, sharing, storing, and over time perhaps learning and predicting based on habits, behaviors, location, preferences, purchases and more.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Tom Wesselman, Director of Communications Ecosystem Architecture at Plantronics, will examine the still nascent IoT as it is coalescing, including what it is today, what it might ultimately be, the role of wearable tech, and technology gaps stil...

With several hundred implementations of IoT-enabled solutions in the past 12 months alone, this session will focus on experience over the art of the possible. Many can only imagine the most advanced telematics platform ever deployed, supporting millions of customers, producing tens of thousands events or GBs per trip, and hundreds of TBs per month.
With the ability to support a billion sensor events per second, over 30PB of warm data for analytics, and hundreds of PBs for an data analytics archive, in his session at @ThingsExpo, Jim Kaskade, Vice President and General Manager, Big Data & Ana...

The Internet of Things has emerged as the universally accepted term for the ‘next big thing’ wave, not replacing but building upon the Cloud Computing cycle, which itself built upon SaaS and ASPs.
There are many technology aspects to this trend, which will be covered extensively throughout this guide and ongoing series, but overall our goal is to describe the associated startup venture opportunities.
Indeed it’s not limited to startups, the IoT represents a new product innovation platform for any and all businesses, and this is the overall theme of this paper.

An anatomy of startup ventures for the Internet of Things market. Like GE describes in their white paper Pushing the Boundaries of Mind and Machine, this is basically a process of innovating through more intelligent machines to reinvent workflow models.
For a useful overview as to what constitutes an ‘IoT startup’, check out one example for some key characteristics: Hutgrip. Hutgrip is a SaaS solution that replaces VPNs with the Cloud and real time analytics, with the headline points being:
Clear description of the business benefit the new technology will bring – Smarter automation of bi...

A large US insurance carrier, based in the Midwest, has improved its applications’ lifecycle to make enterprise mobility a must-have business strength.
This five-part series of penetrating discussions on the latest in enterprise mobility explores advancements in applications design and deployment technologies across the full spectrum of edge devices and operating environments.
Our next innovation interview focuses on how a large US insurance carrier, based in the Midwest, has improved its applications’ lifecycle to make enterprise mobility a must-have business strength.

Containers and microservices have become topics of intense interest throughout the cloud developer and enterprise IT communities.
Accordingly, attendees at the upcoming 16th Cloud Expo at the Javits Center in New York June 9-11 will find fresh new content in a new track called PaaS | Containers & Microservices
Containers are not being considered for the first time by the cloud community, but a current era of re-consideration has pushed them to the top of the cloud agenda. With the launch of Docker's initial release in March of 2013, interest was revved up several notches. Then late last...

We continue to see an increasing trend in cyber-attacks in line with the growth of new technologies, and enterprises have to protect themselves. It is critical for enterprises to devise their own measures to protect against cyber-attacks because any tolerance on this front is more than an IT issue but may affect the very existence and the business model of the enterprise. We have seen in a recent incident where a cyber-attack prevented a large enterprise from performing their basic business process.

One of the most exciting parts of this week's Apple Watch launch was the example of the BMW watch app. This app allows you to see the charging status of your BMWi electric car, right from your wrist. You can also check the status of the doors of your car (important information such as if they are locked or not!). Although the star of the show was the watch app, APIs had a cameo appearance, since the information shown on the watch is fetched in real-time from APIs.

One of the neat things about microservices is the ability to segment functional actions into scalability domains. Login, browsing, and checkout are separate functional domains that can each be scaled according to demand. While one hopes that checkout is similarly in demand, it is unlikely to be as popular as browsing, after all, and the days of wasting expensive money on idle compute resources went out when the clouds descended.
In that same vein comes the ability to also create performance domains. After all, if you're scaling out a specific functional service domain you can also specify p...

It is no surprise to anyone that service providers need to find new sources of revenue and increase profitability. The digital, cloud and as-a-service revolution provides a silver lining.
As IT organizations feel the tension that comes from a combination of aging legacy B2B infrastructure, changing business mandates and rapidly evolving e-commerce requirements, they are increasingly looking at digital services and outsourcing to trusted providers. They want a trusted partner to deliver connected digital services; including mobile, cloud and M2M/IoT.
The pressure is on for businesses to thin...

When people talk about the Internet of Things (IoT) they tend to think about big data technologies like Hadoop where petabyte size datasets are store and analyzed for both known and unknown patterns. What many people don’t realize is that many IoT use cases only require small datasets.

I attended a Meetup yesterday in Mountain View, hosted by The Hive group on the subject of Lambda Architecture. Since I had never heard about this new phrase, my curiosity took me there. There was a panel discussion and panelists came from Hortonworks, Cloudera, MapR, Teradata, etc.
Lambda Architecture is a useful framework to think about designing big data applications. Nathan Marz designed this generic architecture addressing common requirements for big data based on his experience working on distributed data processing systems at Twitter. Some of the key requirements in building this archi...

Back in 2003 I wrote an article that described the forthcoming evolution of the Cloud, and with it the development towards the SIngularity. The growing use of XML Web services would see them evolve to become intelligent agents, forming the basis for this collective.
This would fit well with the vision of the ‘Internet of Things’, where lots and lots of devices of all shapes and sizes will be equipped with an IP address and some small amount of self intelligence. Cars and traffic lights that are able to interoperate to better manage themselves for example.

Connected cars will create new business models and provide opportunities for current businesses to greatly improve their service offerings.
Areas like targeted marketing, fleet management, event planning, city planning, insurance, and auto repair will benefit immensely from the data that connected cars will provide in the not too distant future.
Check out my latest post on Forbes to see how.

A friend of mine's son recently returned from an extended absence which basically removed him from nearly all aspects of technology, including the Internet, for a bit longer than 5 years. Upon return, observing him restore his awareness of technologies and absorb all things new developed over the past 5 years was both exciting and moving.
To be fair, the guy grew up in an Internet world, with access to online resources including Facebook, Twitter, and other social applications.
The interesting part of his re-introduction to the "wired" world was watching the comprehension flashes he went t...

I ran into an interesting problems with JavaFX. When the GUI is done in FXML it seems that if a scene has only shapes (e.g., Rectangle, Circle, etc.) the handler method doesn’t receive keyboard events. And the problem seems to be that there is no way (at least I don’t see it) to give a focus to such a scene. I found a workaround, but I’d appreciate if someone could offer a cleaner solution or confirm that this is a JavaFX bug.

Lou Gerstner became president of American Express in 1985 at the age of 43. He dismissed the speculation that his success was the product of being a workaholic. Gerstner said, “I hear that, and I can’t accept that. A workaholic can’t take vacations, and I take four weeks a year.”
As I write this, I’m in Wyoming with the family enjoying Yellowstone and Jackson Hole thinking, “Can I somehow achieve the level of impact of Lou Gerstner with the right work-life balance?” What keeps people from having to cancel vacations, modifying schedules to take budget calls, or work while the family sleeps?...

The competition among public cloud providers is red hot, private cloud continues to grab increasing shares of IT budgets, and hybrid cloud strategies are beginning to conquer the enterprise IT world.

Big Data is driving dramatic leaps in resource requirements and capabilities, and now the Internet of Things promises an exponential leap in the size of the Internet and Worldwide Web.

The world of SDX now encompasses Software-Defined Data Centers (SDDCs) as the technology world prepares for the Zettabyte Age.

Add the key topics of WebRTC and DevOps into the mix, and you have three days of pure cloud computing that you simply cannot miss.

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